| In 2006 I came to Shanghai for the first time for a couple of months, where I came in contact with the experimental music/noise scene in Shanghai. Leo Xu organized a show at the Zhu Quizan Museum with Wang Changcun and I. We discovered many common threads in our work and the way we perceive sound, and have since played together at NoiShanghai in 2006 and 2007, also with Torturing Nurse. It’s a small scene but quite an active one, and I find the work interesting and inspiring. Sound and phonography reflect an environment, so I suppose China was unknown to me. What I have found since is that the approach and conduct is similar to the practice of musique concrète and sound art elsewhere, but of course Chinese culture and musical tradition, and a certain reaction to it is also inherent. | 
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Elizabeth Kimball talks to Melanie Velarde, a Berlin-based artist.
Elizabeth Kimball: You work with field recordings to create digital-sound art and sentient-sound environments. In 2006, you and sound artist, Wang Changcun, met while performing together in Shanghai. Your mutual interests in evolvements of phonography and site-specific recordings led to future collaborative performances, including, Gulliver, at West Space in Melbourne, November 2007. Can you tell us a little about these experiences?
Melanie Velarde: In 2006 I came to Shanghai for the first time for a couple of months, where I came in contact with the experimental music/noise scene in Shanghai. Leo Xu organized a show at the Zhu Quizan Museum with Wang Changcun and I. We discovered many common threads in our work and the way we perceive sound, and have since played together at NoiShanghai in 2006 and 2007, also with Torturing Nurse.
It’s a small scene but quite an active one, and I find the work interesting and inspiring. Sound and phonography reflect an environment, so I suppose China was unknown to me. What I have found since is that the approach and conduct is similar to the practice of musique concrète and sound art elsewhere, but of course Chinese culture and musical tradition, and a certain reaction to it is also inherent. I believe, also, the drastic transformation of the cities in China, and with it, their sonic environment, is reflected in the work.
EK: Can you tell me more about the collaboration between you and Wang Changcun? What sort of dialogue and questions came to light through working together?
MV: Wang Changcun and I are both interested in field recordings. We also use field recordings in our performances. We collaborated most recently on an installation in Melbourne, Australia, and were interested in how we could oppose and work with different sonic landscapes and situations (which we collected from our environment, in this case, China and Germany,) and what would happen to a neutral space when you bring different soundscapes into it.
Field recordings are like snapshots of scenes, events, and spaces. What happens when you start to mix and change them, isolated from their origin? What happens to the space? We also looked at soundscapes in films for inspiration, like the ones of Michael Hanecke for their simplicity and directness. We tried to address: how can a new story unfold? How do you create tension, action, sequence, timelines, and stories with isolated elements like the sound of a Chinese school bus, a German supermarket, and a mosquito zapper? I guess the intent was to create something like being in a film, but in an abstract space with no visual reference, only sound.
EK: How do you feel the interwoven recordings carved out the space for the participant in that case? Could the participant navigate in a sense, through time, successfully across a meaningful sequence of events and sounds?
MV: I guess in this case, it ended up a little more abstract than that, a bit more like a dream sequence. We actively avoided creating too much of a thought-out sequence, but when you let different stories unfold. It’s interesting how our associations with sound and what sound triggers in us, make us mentally draw things together, despite no immediate relation.
This is something that is quite of interest to me, and I would like to explore it further. The semiotics of sound creates pictures and stories, different notions of spaces and events. Time and sequence are interesting elements (they seem to be the real storytellers,) in that it seems to be more about the combination, cuts, and framing.
EK: Did the infusion of Chinese sounds tap into the Chinese diasporas in Australia at all? How do you think sound art carries the history of a culture; and reconciles the present and potential future of emerging cultures?
MV: I guess it’s interesting how a Seven-Eleven in Chinatown, Melbourne, sounds the same in Shanghai. I don’t really want to talk about a globalization of sound, but there are elements of it to be found. I believe sound art is a pretty pure form of experimentation and a direct form of expression. There are no market values or economic dynamics operating here. To this day, it seems more avant-garde, and in that it seems to offer a reaction and digestion that operates on its own.
Technology and digital possibilities like the Internet have created another platform all together where all these can operate. Connections, exchanges, and distributions are made beyond the boarders of China independently, though the opportunity for Chinese sound artists to travel abroad is still very limited.
Sound art is interesting as a reflection of a cultural development, as it also holds references to technology, architecture, sculpture, poetry, and of course, music. It’s interesting to see what happens when older Chinese musical traditions clash or flirt with Max/MSP, circuit bending, and other forms of digital processing. From archiving soundscapes of disappearing Chinese landscapes, or finding new frameworks and applications for traditional instruments, to the production of pure noise and radical performance, as a language or material, it’s a powerful form of expression and in that of course vital to a culture.
EK: What is the next frontier for you as a sound artist; vetting new ideas or tinkering with a new project in particular?
MV: Although I am not really a tech-head, I am interested, at the moment, in the use of a digital Theremin, sort of like a modern version of that instrument. It involves a kind of sensor that can be attached to things and trigger different sounds through body movement; so I suppose you could bring a plant to talk as well. Also, for me the possibilities to generate sound through electricity using things like potatoes and jelly are quite inspiring in terms of installation work as well. I am also interested and have been using more musical elements and voice, which is always exciting because it’s less abstract, more personal. At the moment, I am also experimenting with the combination of different keynotes and field recordings. This opens the possibility for me to create with the same environment, different moods. I would like to experiment with some of those elements next, in the form of a performance/installation and radio piece.
EK: I admire the juxtaposition of a very subjective, even introspective process (as in the field recordings,) with the interactive, scientific explorations of the sensory environments and MSP processing systems. As an artist, does the science and technology component of your process introduce a sense of magic to you?
MV: Absolutely, and especially because the dynamics of physics, chemistry, and technology have always had something mysterious and also quite fundamental to me, meaning, a little hard for me to really comprehend it in all its details and complexity. Even though some of it is elemental stuff, like the notion of what a conductor is, transmitter, etc., that mysteriousness is the interesting part of it. On the other hand, it’s quite important to me not to get lost in technology and methodology, and to keep the subjective part alive, but it gets interesting for me when those elements can be used like instruments or as a form of materiality.
